TO BE HONEST
If we confess our sins, He is faithful and righteous to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. If we say that we have not sinned, we make Him a liar and His word is not in us.
(1 John 1: 9-10 – NAS)
John does love to make sure his point is getting across. We really need to be honest with the Lord, admitting our sins and not trying to avoid them. And that admission has to address everything. We can’t excuse things to ourselves, we need to admit where we’ve gotten things wrong.
We are inclined to believe that if there has been no intention to do harm or to offend the laws and will of God there cannot be a sin against God. But I think we are mistaking the benefits of the forgiveness of God as a lack of offense against God. By that I mean that because God loves us and extends His grace to us in so many ways, even when we “innocently” get things wrong, we think that what we did was not, in fact, wrong.
But that’s not the reality. There are, really, only two conditions: there is the perfection of the Lord God and then there is everything else.
If something is “not perfect,” it is outside God and thus “wrong.” It doesn’t really matter how it came to be outside God, the point is that it is outside His perfection. That is the definition of sin.
We excuse so much by saying “Nobody’s perfect.” Since we live in the world, we accept that people and things will be flawed, and we try and make the best of them, as best we can. Sometimes, we even revel in our lack of perception. We celebrate errors and misses (so long as we believe that nobody is hurt by them). We mock things that have attempted to be glorious and then fail miserably (we even bestow mocking awards for such failures).
Why are we so ready to celebrate such failure? Because we fear that perfection is impossible, and we want to “feel good” about something.
We don’t want to admit to our sins of incompleteness, of failure of successful execution, of the frailties of our human nature. And so we protect ourselves by saying “I meant to do that! It’s perfectly the way I intended it to be!” (even when in our hearts we know very well it is not).
We want to believe that we are good people, that we are not doing things that would offend the nature of the Lord. We try to follow the teachings of Jesus. We do our best to be loving and caring to those around us, certainly to those close to us. We try to make choices that honor God in all things. We seek to avoid doing harm to others. And yet....
Every day we get things wrong. Fatigue makes us careless toward the strangers we pass, and we can inadvertently leave a wake of small injuries behind us. Stress can make us blind to the need of someone near to us, and so we pass by moments when even a small word of love could bring healing to someone. Fear leads us to lash out at someone who irritates us briefly. And all this is wrong. All this is sin. All this is outside the perfection of God.
These are the things about which we need to be honest to God. These are the things that John means we have to confess. These are the things that we lie about when we say that we are without sin. Because they happen every day of our lives, and we just sweep past them.
But the Lord knows our doings. He sees all our actions. He knows when we have been inattentive.
And He knows that, because we are imperfect we will indeed get things wrong. He does not fault us for that – that is why His forgiveness is so ready at hand when we seek it out.
But He wants us to admit to these failures. Not in the way of making a mockery of them, nor in celebrating the failure (which almost invites us to keep repeating the failure for the benefit of getting attention). Rather He just wants us to admit how badly we are at trying to emulate His perfection. When we admit that, we give Him an opening to clean it, straighten it out, bring it nearer to Him – to make it righteous.
One of the many things I do in my life is make art. I have drawn pictures since I was a very small child. Give me a piece of paper and something to draw with, and I can amuse myself for any stretch of time. But when I am intentionally working on a piece, I don’t always “get it right” with every single stroke of my pen or pencil. Sometimes I lay down a line that just “doesn’t fit.” It’s wrong. There’s no way around it. It is not going to work. And so I have to adjust it – erase the parts that are out of place, smooth the edges, correct the errors. When I do that, you could say that I was making it “righteous.”
This is what God does when we confess our sins to him. Not just our big sins, where we knowingly plunged into major error driven by our emotions, but also the small incidental wrongs that we leave behind us through inattention, self-centeredness, and carelessness. God will smooth out the edges, correct and straighten the lines, wipe away the stains and glitches. But we have to confess that they exist. We have to acknowledge that we have not done well. We have to bring it before the Lord, and admit that we’ve made a mess here.
John makes the point that if we do not confess, “we make Him [the Lord] a liar and His word is not in us.”
We know that the Lord is no liar. Why would we even try to make Him so? We want His word to be in us, to be alive and active in us. We want to be worthy of fellowship with Him.
We excuse our sins by holding on to our imperfection – by holding on to our sins. “After all,” we say, “I’m not God.” We believe that we are being humble in admitting that. “I’m not God, I’ll never be God.” And we accept that, and so sail on in our imperfection, not bothering to confess all the small sins of our day.
But Jesus came to teach us how to be the Children of God, how to be the heirs to God’s kingdom, how to become like Jesus Himself. Is that not a gift worth striving for? But we cannot get there if we do not submit our poor artwork to the Master Artist for correction. We cannot get there if we do not confess how easily we fail in even the small things. How can God correct and perfect the flaws if we insist that we got everything right and it is perfect, when He can see quite clearly that it is not?
“Confession is good for the soul,” it is said. God can work with us when we admit that we got it wrong.
If we confess our sins, He is faithful and righteous to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. If we say that we have not sinned, we make Him a liar and His word is not in us.
(1 John 1: 9-10 – NAS)
John does love to make sure his point is getting across. We really need to be honest with the Lord, admitting our sins and not trying to avoid them. And that admission has to address everything. We can’t excuse things to ourselves, we need to admit where we’ve gotten things wrong.
We are inclined to believe that if there has been no intention to do harm or to offend the laws and will of God there cannot be a sin against God. But I think we are mistaking the benefits of the forgiveness of God as a lack of offense against God. By that I mean that because God loves us and extends His grace to us in so many ways, even when we “innocently” get things wrong, we think that what we did was not, in fact, wrong.
But that’s not the reality. There are, really, only two conditions: there is the perfection of the Lord God and then there is everything else.
If something is “not perfect,” it is outside God and thus “wrong.” It doesn’t really matter how it came to be outside God, the point is that it is outside His perfection. That is the definition of sin.
We excuse so much by saying “Nobody’s perfect.” Since we live in the world, we accept that people and things will be flawed, and we try and make the best of them, as best we can. Sometimes, we even revel in our lack of perception. We celebrate errors and misses (so long as we believe that nobody is hurt by them). We mock things that have attempted to be glorious and then fail miserably (we even bestow mocking awards for such failures).
Why are we so ready to celebrate such failure? Because we fear that perfection is impossible, and we want to “feel good” about something.
We don’t want to admit to our sins of incompleteness, of failure of successful execution, of the frailties of our human nature. And so we protect ourselves by saying “I meant to do that! It’s perfectly the way I intended it to be!” (even when in our hearts we know very well it is not).
We want to believe that we are good people, that we are not doing things that would offend the nature of the Lord. We try to follow the teachings of Jesus. We do our best to be loving and caring to those around us, certainly to those close to us. We try to make choices that honor God in all things. We seek to avoid doing harm to others. And yet....
Every day we get things wrong. Fatigue makes us careless toward the strangers we pass, and we can inadvertently leave a wake of small injuries behind us. Stress can make us blind to the need of someone near to us, and so we pass by moments when even a small word of love could bring healing to someone. Fear leads us to lash out at someone who irritates us briefly. And all this is wrong. All this is sin. All this is outside the perfection of God.
These are the things about which we need to be honest to God. These are the things that John means we have to confess. These are the things that we lie about when we say that we are without sin. Because they happen every day of our lives, and we just sweep past them.
But the Lord knows our doings. He sees all our actions. He knows when we have been inattentive.
And He knows that, because we are imperfect we will indeed get things wrong. He does not fault us for that – that is why His forgiveness is so ready at hand when we seek it out.
But He wants us to admit to these failures. Not in the way of making a mockery of them, nor in celebrating the failure (which almost invites us to keep repeating the failure for the benefit of getting attention). Rather He just wants us to admit how badly we are at trying to emulate His perfection. When we admit that, we give Him an opening to clean it, straighten it out, bring it nearer to Him – to make it righteous.
One of the many things I do in my life is make art. I have drawn pictures since I was a very small child. Give me a piece of paper and something to draw with, and I can amuse myself for any stretch of time. But when I am intentionally working on a piece, I don’t always “get it right” with every single stroke of my pen or pencil. Sometimes I lay down a line that just “doesn’t fit.” It’s wrong. There’s no way around it. It is not going to work. And so I have to adjust it – erase the parts that are out of place, smooth the edges, correct the errors. When I do that, you could say that I was making it “righteous.”
This is what God does when we confess our sins to him. Not just our big sins, where we knowingly plunged into major error driven by our emotions, but also the small incidental wrongs that we leave behind us through inattention, self-centeredness, and carelessness. God will smooth out the edges, correct and straighten the lines, wipe away the stains and glitches. But we have to confess that they exist. We have to acknowledge that we have not done well. We have to bring it before the Lord, and admit that we’ve made a mess here.
John makes the point that if we do not confess, “we make Him [the Lord] a liar and His word is not in us.”
We know that the Lord is no liar. Why would we even try to make Him so? We want His word to be in us, to be alive and active in us. We want to be worthy of fellowship with Him.
We excuse our sins by holding on to our imperfection – by holding on to our sins. “After all,” we say, “I’m not God.” We believe that we are being humble in admitting that. “I’m not God, I’ll never be God.” And we accept that, and so sail on in our imperfection, not bothering to confess all the small sins of our day.
But Jesus came to teach us how to be the Children of God, how to be the heirs to God’s kingdom, how to become like Jesus Himself. Is that not a gift worth striving for? But we cannot get there if we do not submit our poor artwork to the Master Artist for correction. We cannot get there if we do not confess how easily we fail in even the small things. How can God correct and perfect the flaws if we insist that we got everything right and it is perfect, when He can see quite clearly that it is not?
“Confession is good for the soul,” it is said. God can work with us when we admit that we got it wrong.
Labels: 1 John 1, Confession, Witness To Light
posted by Sarah | 9:09 AM
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